Believe it or not the North Pole is not a continent. Nor is it a country. It is solid but it is liquid. Nothing grows there and almost no one goes there. It is never in precisely the same place that it was only a moment ago. It is always in flux, shifting and floating. All ice, not a bit of earth beneath it, it is the roof of the world. It is the North Pole.

   The earth is home to two North Poles located in the Arctic region a geographic North Pole and a magnetic North Pole.

   The northernmost point on the earth's surface is the geographic North Pole, otherwise known as true north. It's located at 90° North latitude and all lines of longitude converge at the pole. The earth's axis connects the north and south poles, as its the line around which the earth rotates.

   If you're standing at the North Pole, all points are south of you (east and west have no bearing). Since the earth's rotation takes place once every 24 hours, if you're at the North Pole your speed of rotation is quite slow at almost no speed at all, compared to the speed at the equator at about 1,038 miles per hour.

   During the sixteenth century, mariners believed that somewhere in the North was a magnetic mountain that was the source of attraction for compasses, and, unfortunately, for any ships that strayed too close to it. It was not until 1600 that someone came up with a better idea. Sir William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, suggested that the Earth itself was a giant magnet and that the force that directed the compass originated inside the Earth. Gilbert believed that the North Magnetic Pole coincided with the north geographic pole. Magnetic observations made by explorers in subsequent decades showed that this was not true, and by the early nineteenth century, the accumulated observations proved that the pole must be somewhere in Arctic Canada.

   A magnetic compass does not point toward the true North Pole of the Earth. Rather, it more closely points toward the North Magnetic Pole of the Earth.

   The magnetic north pole is in fact located more than 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) south of the geographic North Pole. The location of the pole is an average position because the pole wanders daily in a roughly elliptical path , and may frequently be as much as 80 km away from this position when the Earth's magnetic field is disturbed.

   In 1994 the average position of the North Magnetic Pole was located on the Noice Peninsula, southwest Ellef Ringnes Island, at 78.3° N, 104.0° W. The yearly motion of the pole has increased, and is now 15 km per year. According to NOAA, "evidence indicates that the North Magnetic Pole has wandered over much of the Earth's surface in the 4.5 billion years since the Earth formed."